Aperture sweetspot?

[parkgt]

Flat wall shooting is for sharpness. If you angle your gimbal down and play with the aperture it will give you DOF.

Also shooting at a flat wall and changing the aperture will also show you sharpness and diffraction.

If you are close to a subject, for example. A boat, person, car or tree at f2.8 and focus on that, the background will have softness or as people call it Bokeh. Make the aperture smaller for eg. F5.6, the larger or wider the DOF more of the background will be in focus.

Please post examples of this test demonstrating how it works for evaluating sharpness or DOF. I can't imagine this method being very useful.

I think any decent photographer understands how aperture and DOF work with normal lens. The problem is it is very unlikely that DOF will be a manipulated factor in most drone photos. Please show the differences you say you see in DOF at your sweat spot of f5.6 and say f3.2?

 

[Eagle's Eye Photo]

From a photographic perspective, there is a whole other factor that has not been considered. We all have the same landscape photo/video camera. A camera that by definition, has a wide angle lens... equivalent to a 35mm wide angle lens for a full frame 35mm camera.

No one has brought up the relationship between the focal length of the lens and Depth of Field. It is demonstrated by looking at photographs of any athletic event... the vast majority of sports photography are with telephoto lenses and the DOF is noticably shallower.

However our cameras (having a wide angle lens), all have a greater DOF than average cameras... but wait, there's more...

Then on top of that, our work is usually a distance from the subject (whatever minimum height above of a roof, if you were doing an inspection job... as an example) or greater... depending on the area of the subject. I would venture to guess anything beyond 200 feet qualifies as "infinity"... where everything is in focus for this camera.

As well, the Autel Explorer app allows you to manually reset the focus point... whether in AF or MF, video or photo modes... by tapping on your device's screen.

 

[parkgt]

From a photographic perspective, there is a whole other factor that has not been considered.

No one has brought up the relationship between the focal length of the lens and Depth of Field.

99.9% of the time DOF is not a consideration when using a drone with these types of cameras.

 

[Eagle's Eye Photo]

99.9% of the time DOF is not a consideration when using a drone with these types of cameras.

Agreed... the whole discussion of DOF in aerial work is an academic exercise in theory... with virtually no use in real world conditions. Certainly no relevence to the OP's original question.

 

[herein2021]

Threads like these still make me smile.....pixel peeping at its finest, I used to do the same thing. These days I just get out and shoot; below are the only F stops that I use with the EVO II 6K without ever having checked a chart.

With a 35mm FF equivalent lens, 1" sensor, and typical drone camera to subject distance of at least 50' with a typical viewing medium a cell phone screen any aperture will work.

Photography - Day: F5.6
Photography - Night: F2.8
Photography - Action Sports: F2.8

Video - Day: F11
Video - Night: F2.8

 

[parkgt]

Threads like these still make me smile.....pixel peeping at its finest, I used to do the same thing. These days I just get out and shoot; below are the only F stops that I use with the EVO II 6K without ever having checked a chart.

With a 35mm FF equivalent lens, 1" sensor, and typical drone camera to subject distance of at least 50' with a typical viewing medium a cell phone screen any aperture will work.

Photography - Day: F5.6
Photography - Night: F2.8
Photography - Action Sports: F2.8

Video - Day: F11
Video - Night: F2.8

Why use F11 during the day for video when just about any test method will show seriously degraded sharpness? F2.8 is not ideal for all situations, but it is not the huge tradeoff that F11 is.

And why bother having a E2P if you viewing is going to be a cell phone screen. Don't think I have ever watched my drone footage on a cell phone screen.

 

[herein2021]

Why use F11 during the day for video when just about any test method will show seriously degraded sharpness? F2.8 is not ideal for all situations, but it is not the huge tradeoff that F11 is.

And why bother having a E2P if you viewing is going to be a cell phone screen. Don't think I have ever watched my drone footage on a cell phone screen.

For one thing F11 is not "seriously degraded" sharpness or a "huge" tradeff vs F5.6...is it less sharp than F5.6 probably slightly, but enough to matter in the grand scheme of things; not really if at all, in fact I posted sample pictures here without showing the aperture each one was shot at and no one could identify which was which. The difference was I shot at a real world distance of around 50'+ not a few feet away from a sharpness chart indoors.

I use F11 for video for two reasons; the first is because it is slightly less sharp than F5.6 and I actually want the less sharp look for video since Autel just like every other drone maker oversharpens their video to the point of looking camcorderish in fact I go a step farther and turn down sharpness even farther by shooting in ALOG and setting sharpness to -2, the second and main reason is because I do not use ND filters so F11 lets me lower the shutter speed to retain a bit of motion blur in most situations.

I rarely shoot footage for myself, my target audience is whoever my clients say it is and if you think most people are not viewing the footage you post online via their cell phone then you are sadly mistaken. If you are only shooting for yourself and you plan on watching your completed footage on your large 4K monitor/TV that is all good and well; but I shoot for commercial clients where they will post the footage on TV, social media platforms, their websites etc; 75% of their viewers consume that content via mobile devices where the differences in sharpness between F11 and F5.6 are truly imperceptible when shooting with a 35mm FF equivalent lens and a typical drone camera to subject distance.

People these days really get stuck in the spec wars and pixel peeping tests; I've been shooting for commercial customer's for over 10yrs and I can tell you 99% of the things that YouTubers tell you that you should be stressed about actually isn't important at all. I could literally shoot every single commercial project at F2.8 or F11 and not one customer would notice or care.

 

[parkgt]

People these days really get stuck in the spec wars and pixel peeping tests; I've been shooting for commercial customer's for over 10yrs and I can tell you 99% of the things that YouTubers tell you that you should be stressed about actually isn't important at all. I could literally shoot every single commercial project at F2.8 or F11 and not one customer would notice or care.

You make some interesting points that apply to your use case but may not be relevant to the original question. Since sharpness doesn't matter to you why reply to this thread? For some it does and they want to know what apertures may be best.

 

[herein2021]

You make some interesting points that apply to your use case but may not be relevant to the original question. Since sharpness doesn't matter to you why reply to this thread? For some it does and they want to know what apertures may be best.

The whole point of a forum is to see and hear from different people's perspectives and at times use cases that you may not have encountered or considered. Additionally, discussing aperture and the different ways that it can be used effectively even given the sharpness variations between them and placing those variances into real world scenarios is absolutely relevant to the thread at hand.

DOF, FOV, Exposure, Editing, Color Grading, Audio, etc. I would 100% agree with you that those are not relevant to the topic at hand. But for me personally I am openminded enough to welcome additional viewpoints and perspectives even when they do not fit entirely into the original scope of the OP.